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Old 29th Nov 2020, 12:35 am   #1
G8UWM-MildMartin
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 826
Default ASCII VT100 video terminal emulator (from a kit)

At work, there is sometimes need for an ASCII terminal to test old equipment.
The original terminal wore out or blew up long before I joined and was replaced by a laptop computer running Hyperterminal under Windows 2000.
It died (I suspect the HDD) and our IT department didn't want to know, suggesting a new one on a 3-year lease as per current policy and an external serial-to-USB converter, and it wouldn't have had a terminal emulator program on it anyway...

I wondered whether there might be something more suitable available and found this:
https://www.budgetronics.eu/en/build...kit/a-25776-20
which was designed by Geoff Graham
https://geoffg.net/terminal.html
It needed a VGA monitor and a PS/2 keyboard, which we had.

It was easy to construct, worked first time, boots almost instantly, and does the job required.
(I selected the green output for text.)
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Old 29th Nov 2020, 4:38 pm   #2
SiriusHardware
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK.
Posts: 11,484
Default Re: ASCII VT100 video terminal emulator (from a kit)

A nice project, although I think if that 2014 project were being designed today it would probably have to use a USB keyboard and have HDMI-out, an indication, I suppose, of the rate of change in the modern IT world.

Still, at the moment there are plenty of old PS/2 keyboards and CRT / LCD VGA monitors dodging landfill and looking for a new purpose in life.

For comparable (or less) cost, you could use a £5 Raspberry Pi Zero running your Linux terminal program of choice - there are additional costs, the price of a MicroSD card, any necessary converter / adaptor leads for the USB and HDMI ports, a £2 MAX3232 based RS232-TTL level converter PCB for the serial port and so on - but it might still weigh in at less than the cost of that kit.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero

However, it wouldn't have the instant-on convenience of this hardware project.
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Old 29th Nov 2020, 7:47 pm   #3
G6Tanuki
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
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Default Re: ASCII VT100 video terminal emulator (from a kit)

in the times I used to have to support such stuff, my "Go-to" was invariably Kermit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)

If you can't getr Kermit to do your terminal-emulation-thing, then you __really__ have problems.

Kermit flavours run under every version of legacy MS-DOS, Windows, Apple's Unix-under-the-GUI-gloss, Android and suchlike.

Apart from the terminal-emulation [which includes IBM3270 and Tek4010/4014 graphics as well as DEC VTxxx, Lear-Siegler ADM, H-P 29xx and pretty much anything 1980s/1990s Unix systems had in /etc/termcaps] - it does a sterling job of error-free file-transfer [with mappable character-set transliterations].
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